Volcatia crackled. "Quiet," she commanded.

The air pulsed.

Mina huddled back into her chair.

"You know who I am," Volcatia said. "Fine. I'm not working for your sister. I don't care if you believe me now, but you will soon.

"Carl and I are friends. I don't care if you believe me about that now, but you will soon.

"Your sister is wife to Marcus Camelius Belenus, a man I'll kill one day.

"You're afraid of her.

"I don't care why.

"If either of them come close to harming you, I'll kill them both."

Talking like this was tedious.

If the girl wasn't so annoying, she'd have avoided having however much of her time wasted, including the time wasted by saying all these words.

This wasn't what Volcatia had wanted to do.

She wanted to be herself.

She wanted to be a human.

She wasn't anymore though, no matter how hard she tried to convince herself otherwise.

"T-truly?" Mina asked in a hesitant tone, her expression regarding Volcatia with…

Mm.

She was the curious type.

Volcatia knew how to handle those.

"Yeah," she said with a nod. "If you're still this afraid next time we talk, I won't answer any of your questions."

Then she put her chair back into her Inventory and moved.

Curious humans always had questions.

Volcatia might not be Smart, but she'd met enough Smart people to have come up with strategies for talking to them.

Smart people always had questions. Smart people who were curious had more questions.

Maybe she shouldn't have bothered trying to be so human.

Volcatia sighed as she looked around the familiar wreckage of an old farmhouse.

She always came back here when she moved without a destination in mind.

The nearby fields that had once grown grains to be sold in Onyxfell were overgrown and uneven, just as they'd been since that day.

The rubble that had been a small barn, once home to, among other animals, a big, old ox named Minutulus.

The stump of the tree where her mother's body had been buried when she'd succumbed to her lingering illness.

She grimaced and moved back to the city before more memories could break through.

Her annoyance and frustration had dispersed.

Now she was once more a human without a place.

Except she wasn't really human.

She was just an entity without a home.

----------------------------------------

"We've probably got a while before anything fun's gonna happen," Volcatia said. "Eat some food, talk to some people, whatever. I'm gonna go check out some legs."

She'd already spotted some that she suspected she was interested in.

There had been the young gladiator that afternoon she'd taken against the wall of some building while he stammered about how he was supposed to be the one doing the taking, but it had only dulled her excitement slightly. His gladius had fit into her vagina as it should, and she'd had her moment of joy as she did, but she was way too energized.

Volcatia liked to fuck when she was excited.

She didn't limit it to those times, since great legs could appear at any moment, but that was when she wanted it the most.

Times like these, when she knew something incredible was going to happen very soon once she wasted a little more time…

She reached the edge of the villa's stone lake where a man and two women were hanging out—she also didn't like the phrase in this use—naked.

"Hey," she called out cheerfully, waving to the man, who was looking at her. "Wanna fuck?"

"I have a battle tomorrow," he replied.

"Not you, her," Volcatia said, pointing to the taller of the two women, the one who had what she'd suspected were beautiful legs as soon as she'd seen the back of her head from the entrance.

She had a sense for this, though it wasn't a System-granted skill.

The woman she'd been eyeing looked back at her, and Volcatia paused.

"Do I know you?" Laberia Salonina asked, her eyes narrowing.

This was a tough decision for Volcatia.

On one hand, this was Laberia Salonina, Discutrix Gladiorum, who had always been known as the most upright and dedicated of gladiators.

On the other hand, this was the same Laberia Salonina she'd breathlessly admired when she'd been much younger, before the System, the other woman herself only around twenty years old at the time.

And her muscular legs were especially gorgeous.

She'd give it a few tries, she decided as her eyes roamed over the older woman's well-muscled form.

Maybe more than just a few, depending…

----------------------------------------

"Fuck, you're a good kis—" Volcatia moaned against the wall in the dim lighting of whatever part of the villa they'd just broken into.

"You're more than ready," Laberia Salonina panted, her lips drawing back as she tried to pull the dress over the shorter woman's head. After another moment of struggles she was victorious, with the dress finding only defeat.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Volcatia groaned as the older woman's fingers played her with a delicate, forceful skill that left her entire body tingling. She didn't even notice when she was lifted and taken into the dangerous part of the room.

Light struck her face, and there was an abrupt end to the pleasurable sensations.

"Scipio?" exclaimed Salonina.

"Fuck."

This was the fifth time. Or was it the sixth? Nah, it had been more than ten already, hadn't it…

"What…" Salonina was kneeling over her, her own face flushed.

"Told you I admired you a long time ago," Volcatia tried.

She'd tried a number of things, but so far the results had ranged from an enraged brawl that destroyed the entire villa, to getting angrily kicked so hard that she flew over the entirety of the city, to cold disinterest, to…

She felt like her whole body was vibrating.

This had long since stopped being a matter of trying.

She wasn't going to lose.

"Shit, I'm nowhere near drunk enough for this," Salonina said with a sigh, placing one hand over her face and sinking back onto her haunches.

That was new.

Volcatia frowned as she roused the cunning part of herself. "Why's that matter?"

"You're what, ten years younger than me?"

"Only eight!"

Salonina grimaced slightly. Her breathing had returned to normal, and the heat was receding quickly from her face.

"So if you were more drunk…"

"I might feel differently, I suppose."

"But you'd be upset after."

"Probably not," Salonina said as she stood back up, offering the younger woman a hand and a friendly smile. "You're a very attractive woman, Scipio. I've always thought you had a pretty face. And I appreciated your apology."

Volcatia stopped watching.

Interesting.

She hadn't imagined Discutrix Gladiorum, so nicknamed for the times she'd lain with weaker men and accidentally shattered their…

Well, she'd never imagined the woman would need to be plied with drink.

Today was a day of learning.

----------------------------------------

"This was fun," said Laberia Salonina. The taller woman cradled Volcatia against her flank. "Can't imagine I'd've done it if I was more sober."

Volcatia stroked her toes against the side of the woman's calf, shivering in delight as she again felt how smooth it was. Her whole body felt hot, though it was more likely from the lingering effect of the drink than their tryst.

"You really like my legs."

"They're great legs, Salonina."

"Thanks, Scipio. Your back is sexy." Salonina ran her fingers lightly down Volcatia's bare shoulder.

Volcatia grinned happily.

This was a perfect start to the night, and it hadn't even been part of her plan.

----------------------------------------

Volcatia scanned the grounds for Carl.

She'd parted from Salonina a few minutes earlier after agreeing to meet up and chat sometime in the near future, or maybe more depending on their moods. What started as a need to conquer her former idol had ended as rekindled admiration for the woman.

A lesser woman would have been deeply hurt by Volcatia's past actions, but Salonina had correctly attributed it to the folly of youth and continued on with her life.

Admirable in many ways.

A true gladiator.

The other woman definitely had the stamina of a top-ranked gladiator to be walking after their time together, she judged. Her legs, thick and well-muscled like they'd been chiseled from stone, wobbled slightly as she'd walked away, and Volcatia felt it was one of the best compliments she'd ever gotten.

Those legs!

It was a struggle for her not to rush over to wherever Salonina had gone to and bask in the presence of the woman's awe-inspiring legs.

They were even more amazing up close!

The proportions between thigh and calf muscles!

So smooth!

So curvy!

So strong!

They were everything Volcatia wanted in legs.

A full fucking meal.

She closed her eyes, and a pair of less strong, curvier, darker-skinned legs flashed through her mind, followed by a shorter, paler set, and a number of other pairs of equally amazing legs.

Yeah, Salonina definitely deserved to be put in there with the greats.

And she didn't get weird after, which made it all even more amazing.

Volcatia caught sight of Carl after wandering around in a leg-minded haze for some amount of time. He was sitting by himself, which was good since she didn't want to miss any of the real excitement.

Then again, she was starting to worry whether the rest of their time here would be able to match up.

She'd just fucked Laberia Salonina and had an open invitation to meet up again, which was going to be hard to surpass.

She walked towards him, her head turning back and forth in case Salonina was nearby with those glorious legs of hers.

She was just going to look.

For now.

Nah, she couldn't.

She had to get back to…

What was she even doing here?

She had some time to think about it at least.

Volcatia took the seat across from Carl. "Hey, having fun so far?" she asked.

She was feeling especially proud at that moment that her dress had managed to survive her encounter entirely intact.

It wasn't the cost of the thing—she'd just thrown a handful of thousand-marks down without bothering to ask for a price—it was that Carl was her friend, and she imagined that he'd be unhappy with her if she was wandering around naked.

He'd gotten upset the time she'd used his workshop's shower without closing the door, after all.

"I guess," said Carl. He didn't seem like he was having fun.

"I had fun," she said.

She was tempted to tell him about her conquest so he could enjoy it with her.

That was what friends did, wasn't it?

She wasn't completely sure.

Carl was weird about some things.

She decided not to this time.

He'd seemed more amused than impressed by her earlier conquest.

"Are you drunk?" he asked.

How did he always know shit like this?

First he knew when she was lying, now he knew when she was drunk?

Did he have a fucking skill…

He didn't have any skills related to this.

Maybe it was a trained skill like her Leg Sense?

"Maybe," she said, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing he was right.

She wasn't very drunk anyway. She'd fucked her way through most of it.

Maybe she should fix that if they were just here having fun…

"I thought you had some kinda plan."

Plan?

"What?" she said to give herself time to think.

Plan, plan, plan, plan…

What plan was he talking about?

Maybe she'd spent too much time trying to conquer the legs of Discutrix Gladiorum.

How many tries had it taken?

Twenty?

Thirty?

A hundred?

She didn't remember exactly.

Probably half a day's worth of time, but it was the best-spent time in recent memory.

Memory…

She felt like she was forgetting something.

Eh, it couldn't be that fucking important if she'd forgotten it.

"Oh, yeah, this is part of the plan," she said.

They just came here to have a good time, didn't they?

Actually, now that she was thinking about it, where was she again?

Urgh, it was going to be one of these times, wasn't it.

This was exactly why she'd set a limit of three tries on conquests.

Too easy to get distracted pursuing a great pair of legs and forget what she was supposed to be doing.

Like the time she was supposed to be training to kill Dakthur and spent a week trying to—

"Vol," Carl said in a certain tone of voice.

"How do you always know?!" Volcatia demanded. She decided to make herself more comfortable to compensate for getting caught by his lie sensing ability.

It wasn't fair.

She didn't use her skill on him, so why did he always use his on her?

That didn't seem like being a great friend.

"It's fine though," Volcatia said, responding to her own thoughts, "totally fine." She took a decanter of wine out of her Inventory.

Why did she have all these decanters of wine if she wasn't going to decant their contents into her mouth?

Hard question to answer.

Maybe impossible.

She imagined not even Smart people could answer a question like that.